Convert

by Rob Bliss

They strung up my three cohorts by their necks from a thick beam in their cathedral. A thousand white and red candles from a massive black iron chandelier lit the cold, dark interior, flickering flames of light against the stained glass saints who hallowed the slaughter.

The bodies of men, women and children lay scattered and heaped, blades of blood slashed across their naked flesh like zebra stripes. The pews cracked and crumbled beneath their weight. A pyramid of half-decomposed heads with maggots and flies for hair stood by the altar. Flesh-cleaned skulls lay strewn, some cracked like antediluvian eggs, others with their jaws crushed to powder, teeth thrown like nuggets of salt. On each skull was painted, with a finger heavy with jewelled rings, an ochre cross. Small statues of saviours were flecked with old brown blood. The smells of shit and piss soaked into the three-hundred-year old wood.

Scimitar blades were attached to twenty-foot-long poles for them to reach high into the airy bodies of my accursed brethren. The red-robed priests, their faces veiled with satin and lace, long ebony rosaries dangling down their torsos to their knees, raised their pikes and slashed at the bodies above. The blades hacked open sinew and muscle, mangled the innards until the steel-slashed organs – intestines, stomach, ovaries, uterus, liver –fell in a wet slap to the mosaic tile floor. Threads of blood streamed in lines from the bodies to their eviscerated flesh below their swaying feet.

It was with this action that I saw that the feminine member of my three cohorts had been with my child. The little blood-white worm twitched on the stone floor, mewled softly from its lipless rictus of a mouth, and sank down its tiny head to sleep forever, nestled in its mother’s bowels.

My heart no longer existed, therefore, it could not break.

The hanging and disembowelment of my magi was to torture me. I was their leader. The priests wanted me to confess, so I gladly did, but they wanted more. I was to be a warning to others of our kind, I suppose. Frankly, one never knows what these holy Knights of the Inquisition truly want.

I worship Satan. Find him a more grounded god than any Christ. He is an entity with predictable purpose and single-minded intent. There are so many versions – interpretations and revisions – of the Christ that one can only be confused by what the Holy One wants from his Flock.

They found me and my coven worshipping our god at midnight in the forests outside Madrid. Perhaps we should have moved farther, across a border or near the sea, but their reach extends across the continent. Religion is no freedom except for them. They’ve expelled, or butchered, the Jews and Mohammedans, so why we Satanists should receive protection is madness to think. (Ah, we all make the simplest mistakes which cause the most complex annihilation!) They kill all who differ, even those of their own members who vary slightly in the interpretation of their scriptures. There are priest’s heads also in that pyramid by the altar.

Our religion – which it is, as legitimate as any other – requires the worship of our god be done in full nudity of both genders. We praise the human form instead of scourging it with reeds and hair shirts. We rejoice in life, therefore we copulate with all of our members. The act of the fuck is hallowed, as uncriminal an act as lacing one’s corset or feasting on venison. What foolish philosophy would impart shame in the act of clothing oneself, or seeing to one’s gastronomic needs? We find this – them, their religion – to be utterly ridiculous. And yet we do not foist our beliefs on them with torture. We perform violence only to protect ourselves and our god. As they do. But they do more. They hunt. They torment to convert, and they butcher those who refuse to renege their god.

Like me and my cohorts. But we expect this from them. They worship a bloody cannibalistic god, so one cannot expect them to relinquish their appetite for flesh. Mere words of my own prejudice? Or facts gleaned from my eye’s witness? Four of them raped a five-year-old Jewess child on the catafalque until she bled to death from her wounds, commanding her the entire time to renounce her false idol god. They wiped their cocks on their robes, then knelt to give thanks for the blessing they had received, claiming to do their lord’s work.

I lay now on the catafalque, the virgin’s shit and piss and blood beneath me. I watch their torture in fascination. I scream and wail as they wish, as my body directs, but try to keep quiet and still to observe their techniques.

I am bound by wrists and ankles, a rope around my neck bends back my head over the stone edge of this death altar.

A small blade etched with the cross of their saviour is held in the shaking hand of their oldest bishop. He slices the first line from the hollow of my throat to my navel, then passes the consecrated knife to a disciple-in-training. A deep enough cut to bleed and separate the skin, but too shallow to kill.

“Do you renounce Satan and his teachings?”

After a scream dries in my throat, I answer, “Satan is more merciful than all of your gods!”

“There is only one God!” the novice disciple, a boy of sixteen, growls in my face. Onions and semen on his breath. The old bishop has passed the knife to him, to train him in the art of Christian conversion. “One-in-Three, the Holy Trinity, rules all! Bow before Christ and your death will be quick.”

“I will sodomize your Christ when I meet him in Hell!” I yell back at the fresh-faced, pretty youth.

A bolus of phlegm shot from my lips to blind his eye. He wrenched back the rope around my neck. My tongue jutted from my mouth. Felt my cock stiffen. He interpreted it as lust, salivated a pearl at the corner of his young mouth, gripped my testicles in his claw, dug his red-painted fingernails into the soft skin.

“Even in death, your Satan fuels you with his deranged lust!” the disciple growled, his bulbous eyes staring into mine, spittle on his cracked white lips. “You also confess to being a sodomite?”

“Do you?” I spat back. “How many men and boys has your cock sheathed?”

A crack of his fist against my jaw. His teeth bit into a flap of my chest’s flayed flesh, and he tore it back to hear me scream. I obliged.

“I’m sure you’ve enjoyed all the tortuous displays since your capture. Perhaps you would’ve made a great priest.”

“I am a great priest,” I retorted, “but not one of your mad god.”

“Only the ways of men are mad,” the youth said. He has studied well, and been wholly indoctrinated. A good boy. “God is sanity enforced.”

I grew bored of him. I relaxed my body to let the torture proceed. His words haunted my thoughts. There was a truth in them that grew. As he cut and tore at my limbs, pulling apart muscle and sinew, possibly to see the pieces of flesh that made up a heathen like me, I was brought to a wondrous revelation.

Christ was Satan! In fact, worse than any demon. His earthly kingdom set up to last centuries, to butcher the freedoms of humanity. Did not Christ himself avow to be the enemy of the world? Did not his Saint Paul travel the world to convert the heathen – first with words, then with the sword? A truly benevolent god would not enforce his philosophies on the unbeliever. Did not his Saint Peter deny him thrice, and was given the Holy Roman Empire as his reward? The Jews have no missionaries or evangelists. Only a Christian god – worse than the bloodiest Roman Caesar – could create an empire of blood-lust such as the one that spread its tendrils from Rome to the pagan world.

Christ was Satan. But he needed to call himself a corporeal god, a prophet of peace, in order to be worshipped by the masses. Few populist movements that eventually call themselves religions would be created around an avowed demon. How would you convert a nation to the worship of Satan without calling down fire and brimstone on your head from other god-fearing nations?

Only a great lie can create a great religion. I wept at the brilliance of it all!

If I was to choose a god of apocalypse, I needed to convert to Christ. “I convert!” I cried, my strained voice echoing around the stone walls of the cathedral. “Hail Christ – Lord of this Heathen Earth!”

The disciple’s blade halted for a moment. His face moved to mine, a smile of black teeth. “Well done. Jesus will accept you into His heavenly kingdom!”

For shame…I renounced my peaceful god on a bed of torture. Not to save me from the exquisite pain, but because I saw the truth of the world around me. The history handed down since Man first looked to the skies and proclaimed the existence of a deity was one prolonged blasphemy. Nothing would change, I feared, due to my conversion.

The Satanic Christians were a mighty empire – now with Rome defeated and converted – which would rule for millennia. A great reign that would outlast all other kingdoms – for those were merely headed by mortals, whereas the Christians were guided by the loving hand of an invisible god.

Jesus was god – and Satan was an excuse. A scapegoat on which to blame the sins of the holy. I saw it all clearly before my head was severed to join the apex of the hollow-eyed pyramid.

My ghost watches from the black chandelier, nestled amongst the candle light. The red priests usher new heathen in daily; I taste their fear, inhale their screams, am given vision by their blood. If only they could understand the blessing of the Christ, as I did at the end. I pray for their epiphany.

The ghosts of Christ grow in number, have become an army to usher the unconverted into the only heaven any human being can expect.

We wait for them all.

Copyright © Rob Bliss

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